Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

The effective use of reporting verbs is an important part of establishing credibility in source-based writing. Although comparative studies of academic writing have shown that the reporting verbs used by novice and expert writers differ by discipline, fewer studies have examined whether such differences exist in English for academic purposes (EAP)…

The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children's growing ability to integrate two or more independent predications. To this end, both intra- and inter-clausal analyses were applied to all CC utterances produced by three Hebrew-acquiring children aged 2;0-3;0,…

The aim of the current study is to determine the distribution of verb valency-driven errors of secondary school students. To this end, this study is framed as a survey research. The sample of the study consists of 200 secondary school students in three schools with different socioeconomic levels. The content and teaching of morphological verb…

Nonsigners viewing sign language are sometimes able to guess the meaning of signs by relying on the overt connection between form and meaning, or iconicity (cf. Ortega, Özyürek, & Peeters, 2020; Strickland et al., 2015). One word class in sign languages that appears to be highly iconic is classifiers: verb-like signs that can refer to location…

The ability to express oneself through written language is a critically important skill for long-term educational, emotional, and social success. However, despite the importance of writing, English Learner students continue to perform at or below basic levels which warrants additional efforts to identify specific areas of weakness that impact…

This study is aimed at investigating how Indonesian writers in multidiscipline use reporting verbs (henceforth RVs) and reporting signals (henceforth RSs) in their research article introductions in English. Fifty research articles (henceforth RAs) were chosen on purpose from the recent edition of five different English language journals in…

The Spanish verbal system offers more evidence for agreement and tense than English, where morphological evidence is less robust. With a focus on the comprehension of verbal agreement morphology by child second (L2) learners of Spanish and English, we extend the Variational Learning account to L2 acquisition to investigate whether the abundance of…

This article examines the input to Argentinian Spanish-learning children from low and middle socioeconomic status (SES). It aims to determine whether the vocabulary composition (nouns and verbs) of their input varies as a function of SES, the addressee and other contextual variables such as the type of activity and the pragmatic orientation of the…

Koh Lipe, Satun is a famous tourist destination along the Andaman Sea, Southern Thailand where linguistic landscape is structured mainly in English. Monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual signage in this island displays distinctiveness of linguistic elements and linguistic diversity manifested in a variety of English lexicons. Thus, this study…

This paper is based within the framework of step-by-step approach to teaching legal translation. The underlying philosophy behind this approach is that when specific aspects of legal translations are tackled in isolation and trainees become aware of the pitfalls involved and the possible solutions, this helps them in further training as well as in…

Children have to figure out the lexicalization of meaning components in learning verb semantics (e.g. Behrens, 1998; Gentner, 1982; Tomasello & Brooks, 1998). The meaning of an English state-change verb (e.g. "break") is divided into two portions (i.e. cause and result), respectively encoded with a separate verb in a Mandarin…

Recent research has shown that knowledge of second language (L2) collocations is important to learners for improving their language processing and production but also that acquiring L2-specific collocations is a very burdensome task for learners. Thus, bootstrapping knowledge of L2 collocations through generalization is highly desirable, but this…

Verb learning is difficult for children (Gentner, [Gentner, D., 1982]), partially because children have a bias to associate a novel verb not only with the action it represents, but also with the object on which it is learned (Kersten & Smith, [Kersten, A.W., 2002]). Here we investigate how well 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 48) generalize…

Five basic types of the English verb were summarized and illustrated with many examples on the basis of the writer's teaching experience and extensive review of various literatures from different English grammar books, reference books, and the consultation of English dictionaries, in order for those English language learners to further understand…